old on him; but not as yet in
the way his inamorata intended.

"Kate," said he one day, "that girl of yours is worth her weight in
gold."

"Indeed!" said Mrs. Gaunt, frigidly; "I have not discovered it."

When Caroline found that her master was single-hearted, and loved his
wife too well to look elsewhere, instead of hating him, she began to
love him more seriously, and to hate his wife, that haughty beauty, who
took such a husband as a matter of course, and held him tight without
troubling her head.

It was a coarse age, and in that very county more than one wife had
suffered jealous agony from her own domestic. But here the parts were
inverted: the lady was at her ease; the servant paid a bitter penalty
for her folly. She was now passionately in love, and had to do menial
offices for her rival every hour of the day: she must sit with Mrs.
Gaunt, and make her dresses, and consult with her how to set off her
hateful beauty to the best advantage. She had to dress her, and look
daggers at her satin skin and royal neck, and to sit behind her an hour
at a time combing and brushing her long golden hair.

How she longed to tear a handful of it out, and then run away! Instead
of that, her happy rival expected her to be as tender and coaxing with
it as Madame de Maintenon was with the Queen's of France.

Ryder called it "yellow stuff" down in the kitchen; that was one
comfort, but a feeble one; the sun came in at the lady's window, and
Ryder's shapely hand was overflowed, and her eyes offended, by waves of
burnished gold: and one day Griffith came in and kissed it in her very
hand. His lips felt nothing but his wife's glorious hair; but, by that
exquisite sensibility which the heart can convey in a moment to the very
finger-nails, Caroline's hand, beneath, felt the soft touch through her
mistress's hair; and the enamored hypocrite thrilled, and then sickened.

The other servants knew, as a matter of domestic history, that Griffith
and Kate lived together a happy couple; but this ardent prude was
compelled by her position to see it, and realize it, every day. She had
to witness little conjugal caresses, and they turned her sick with
jealousy. She was Nobody. They took no more account of her than of the
furniture. The creature never flinched, but stood at her post and ground
her white teeth in silence, and burned, and pined, and raged, and froze,
and was a model of propriety.

On the day in question she was thinking of G